Nicola here, and today I'm asking the provocative question "how many books is too many books"? And as a follow up to that: "What system do you use to categorise your bookshelves?" You see, I need help and advice. The time has finally come to sort out my “library.” This is rather a grand term for a muddled collection of books on shelves, in boxes and in stacks on the floor all over the house with only a notional system of what is where. For years I’ve been saying I need some sort of cataloguing system, yet each time I sit down with my books to try to categorise them, I either get distracted into reading something I had forgotten was there or I am so overwhelmed by the hugeness of the task that I retreat and close the door on the mess. There are obvious downsides to this, most annoyingly the fact that I can’t find half the books I know are there and when I need them for research – or to re-read a favourite novel – I’ll spend ages huffing around looking for them. Also, I have been known on more than one occasion to buy multiple copies of things just because I didn’t realise/remember they were already in my collection. So a neatly-ordered bookshelf is crucial.
How many other people suffer, like me, from “Tsundoku”? This is a Japanese term for someone who possesses a lot of unread literature. According to an 
article on the BBC website a few years ago, the word “doku” can be used as a verb to mean “reading” whilst the word “tsun” originates from “tsumu” meaning to pile up. Which is literally what we are doing with our TBR piles. We have reading material piling up. It’s not a new word or a new concept; the first reference appears in a Japanese text from 1879.
I have a complete inability to walk past a bookshop, especially an antiquarian one, without popping in and buying at least one book. It’s as though there’s a huge book magnet dragging me in. And for me, the more intriguing-sounding and obscure the book, the better. Or perhaps I’ll just see a beautiful cover and be drawn to how pretty it is, and before I know it there are another half dozen books on my pile. And that’s before we get on to new recommendations for history and fiction books which only add to my outrageous wishlist… This apparently is fully-fledged Tsundoku.
Then there is “bibliomania.” Bibliomania is the title of a 19th century novel by Thomas Frognall Dibdin which claimed to 
explore "book madness", defined as the act of being unable to stop collecting literature. By his definition, those afflicted with bibliomania were obsessed with unique books such as first editions and illustrated copies rather than books in general, but these days the term is applied to those who have a more general "passionate enthusiasm" for collecting. Bibliomania describes the intention to create a book collection, tsundoku describes the intention to read books and their eventual, accidental collection. Either way, it’s considered a form of madness!
Is this fair? I don’t think so. At heart I’m someone who loves having books around me and I know I’m not alone in that. I love the feel of them and the smell of them. I love discovering and re-discovering them. So to the minimalists who suggest that you should have no more than 30 books that are “beneficial” to your life, I say sorry, that’s never going to cut it for me. For me the first big question is “is it okay to keep books on my shelves even if I know in my heart of hearts that I’m unlikely ever to read them?” Is it weird just to want to possess them?! If the answer to that question is “no, not at all weird, perfectly understandable and right,” this brings me back around to my original problem. How am I going to organise my shelves?
The stylists amongst us go for colour, size or some other visual arrangement. Whilst I love the look of these shelves and I think it works particularly well with novels, I can’t see colour coding helping me to find my way through a collection of two thousand plus books on everything from the history of peacocks to maps of Regency London. So what am I to do? Follow a Dewey-type library classification system of top level for history and then maybe art, architecture, costume, food, children’s games, gardens, transport, etc? Or should I sort by country by historical era? Where do the historical biographies fit in? Under the appropriate century or a more specific heading? Should I scrap the whole idea and go alphabetical by author – or by subject? You can see why I look at the piles of books, my brain freezes and I shut the door.
So this is why I’m asking for help. How do you sort your bookshelves? Are you colour co-ordinated or alphabetical, library catalogued or joyfully random? Have you discovered or re-discovered a book on your shelves that has made you very happy? Do you have Tsunduko or bibliomania? And how do you organise your Kindle library? That’s a whole other discussion…
